In this BLBD episode, author Kristina Amelong joins me to share the deeply personal journey behind her memoir What My Brother Knew. Through honest conversations and reflection, Kristina explores the life and death of her brother, who died at the age of 13 in a bicycle accident – which he knew would happen. How did he know? How did the family deal with this? How did exploring this family trauma over many years become a path of healing for his sister? What does it mean to carry a sibling’s story forward with care and courage? This episode offers a poignant look at grief, memory, and the power of telling our truths.

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Transcript:

Diane Hullet: Hi, I am Diane Hullet and you’re listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast, and this week I’ve got a guest that I’m really excited about. This is Christina Amalon. Hi Christina. I. 

Kristina Amelong: Hi Diane. It’s so good to be with you. 

Diane Hullet: I feel like I say that every week I have someone I’m excited about, but it’s really true.

Every time I talk to someone, I’m so interested in where the conversation will go. So, um, you’ve just written a book that is coming out in May of 2025, and it’s called What My Brother Knew. And it’s, it’s really a memoir of your family’s experience of your brother’s death when he was a young teenager. So I, in classic Diane style, burned through this book in the last couple days, and I really, really loved what you brought to it.

Both your personal experience and every chapter starts with a really powerful quote about loss or grief or death or, uh, how the body keeps the score in these things, right, which we’ll get into. So just give us kind of an overview of why you decided to write this book and what happened with your brother.

Kristina Amelong: So, um, yeah, when I was 16 and my brother was 12, Jay, he started telling myself, my mother, um, his friends, my cousin, um, maybe more people that I haven’t spoken to, that he was going to die and he was a happy, outgoing, friendly, popular, seemingly well-functioning human being. And so this was. Very unusual. We had no context to hold this story or what he was telling us, but he was very steady with it.

He wasn’t freaked out. He was just very much, this is going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it. It has something to do with a green car. I will die young and I’ll be up above my body watching the paramedics, that’s probably not the word he used. Uh, try to bring me back to life, but they won’t be able to.

And I wanna be buried at Neptune Cemetery in Wisconsin. Uh, it’s the Co Wisconsin, and I want the song Stairway to Heaven played in my funeral and right. And so, uh, right there it’s like, huh. And so, so indeed. Um, a year and a half after he started telling us about this, and as one reads in the book, you find out that this tormented my mother very much, and she did try to stop it, and she did try to make sense of it and relay to it.

Me, I just ignored it pretty much. Um, except when it happened, when he was hit by that car and, um, that green car. And indeed he did, uh, live for, I think it was two hours, um, until he died. Um, and they were working on him pretty intensely and really trying to bring him back to life. Um, but the story so shattered myself, my community, my mother, and.

I needed to talk about it. I needed to work it out. I needed to make sense of it. And, um, and so as the years went by, at first, I just, well, I, I tried to make sense of it by drinking and these kinds of things, forgetting it. But then I worked on my own recovery and I would tell the story and such, but I, the story kept coming up.

You know, I’d be in the car with my, with five year olds or 10 year olds, and somehow we’d get on the story and I’d tell the story and everyone would have rap attention, and they just wanted to hear about it, and it just never left me. And then. Um, I got into contemplative writing and instantly Jay starts showing up on paper and everyone says, you need to write a book about this.

So that’s what I did. And you know, in the whole process, I do feel like I. Part of the reason, and who knows you, you just, you know, it is a huge mystery. But Jay wanted to, to communicate something, and so I feel like I’m carrying a torch of his story. And so that’s the biggest thing for me is that I. I, I’ve done a good job of, of carrying that torch and telling his story, so I’m very pleased about that.

Diane Hullet: Yeah. Yeah. You took it from sort of a need to talk about it, a desire to write about it to a full fledged book that really does, it really honors him in a way. I, one of the writing teachers you talk about working with is Natalie Goldberg, and I’ve always, always loved her as a writing teacher, and you have one of her quotes in the book, which is, write what disturbs you, what you fear.

What you have not been willing to speak about, be willing to split open. And there is for me, this sense in reading your book, that the event of Jay’s death really did, as you said, split you open, split your family open, and split the community open. What, what year did he die? 

Kristina Amelong: 1981, May 27th, 1981, 

Diane Hullet: and there was so much about it that I connected to graduating from high school in 1983.

Right? So the sense that kids had, at that time, more freedom than kids have today. So he was out cruising around with his friends on bikes, and that’s just what they did. And I think at that time, you know, there wasn’t the kind of wisdom that schools have now when a tragedy happens to a young person.

Schools have grief counselors that they come in and so on. And you said on the day he died, you know, school got let out early ’cause no one really knew what to do with grief stricken kids. But, uh, so it is such a story of that time as much as anything else, right? That your family had no way to kind of.

Cope in a direct way because it was the early eighties. We didn’t talk about stuff like we just kind of powered on and got over it, and everyone’s supposed to just move forward. But with that level of trauma, there’s not just a simple moving forward. 

Kristina Amelong: No, absolutely, and it’s, for me, indeed it was very traumatic and so it’s that level of trauma, but it’s also that level of mystery.

You know, it’s so much points to these questions. What is death? What, what happens to us after we die? Do we have a soul? You know, what is this mystery of this universe that we live in? And so for someone to see their future that far in advance, for someone that young to have a felt sense that it was okay to die young, I.

Um, that they would be up above their body. Watching all of that, just still to this day, remains a guiding light for this thing, this death thing, right? And why we wanna talk about it and why it’s such a fascinating subject to explore for all of us, no matter what our age is, right? Because it points to something.

Really miraculous and really beautiful actually. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. That he had this premonition. And you talk about too, that you had synchronicities or. Sort of signs you might say, from Jay that you questioned, you know, it was like, well, do I believe that’s a sign or do I not believe that’s a sign? And how you had to kinda wrestle with that more in your adult years.

As you said, kind of teenage years were like, let me just numb this whole experience out. But eventually was sobriety and kind of that healing that came from deep listening from community. You were able to then sort of open up to that mystery and the signs. I don’t know. Is it easy to call up some of the synchronicities that happened?

Kristina Amelong: Oh, absolutely. Like one of the biggest ones and is, well now they’re just all flooding in. So, um, pretty much every year, well, not, not every year, it really is intermittent and it’s not something I seem to be able to control or know when it’s coming, but often on his birthday or on his death day even. So. I didn’t pick the, um, publication date.

The, the publisher picked it. And so I don’t know if that’s a synchronicity or not. ’cause all they’d have to do is look in the book. But it turns out the day that he died was wrong in the book. It was the day he, they had it as well. We had written it as the day before, but they picked the 27th. So that feels like a fabulous synchronicity, right?

And so many things like the spiritual teacher I have right now, I met him on my brother’s birthday. Um, I was, this story is actually in the book, but this was a really big one where, um, I had opened up a alternative health clinic and, um, a few months into it I had met this woman and she became a friend because she had the same exact birthday as Jay Year, month, day, and um, and then like two months later.

She, and this was in 1998 before the Internet’s a big thing, or internet businesses. And so, and she was an internet person. And so right away we made a little small internet site for my business because I was like, I gotta hang out with this person who has the same day, you know, the same birthday as my brother.

And then like two months later or whatnot, um, this guy came from Chicago and he had been hit by a car. While he was riding his bike and he had the same first and middle name as Jay, and he just said to me, you need to open up an enema store. And I was being a colon therapist and I had learned in colon therapy school that enemas were like the evil thing, you know, stay away from them, don’t promote them.

But the second he said. You know, I’ve come to find somebody that needs to open up an enema store. I just instantly put Janet with him, with myself, and within a month we had enema bag.com and that’s an example. Like I didn’t do any market research. I didn’t do do anything. You know, so many times there’s been moments like that that are just so.

Resonant with like things that I’ll instantly respond to them. And in terms of my internet business, it’s very strong still to this day. So something happened there that was a tremendous gift. 

Diane Hullet: So amazing. True. So for you, dates and names, these are things that have kind of landed sometimes. ’cause I, I know there’s, there’s interesting, you know, there, there can be different signs that different people experience.

But I, I would say to listeners, start asking your friends. I think it’s really something. And I think in our kind of typical dominant Western society, we sort of dismiss those, you know, like, oh yeah, maybe something happened, maybe it didn’t. But when you start asking people, people have enormous.

Experiences with these kind of mysterious happenings. So I don’t know. I, I don’t know that it isn’t more mysterious. Sounds like 

Kristina Amelong: you do know. 

Diane Hullet: That’s right. I kind of suspect it’s more mysterious than we think. Right. It’s very mysterious. Yes. Well, you, you go on this sort of journey to use an overused word, but you go on this kind of journey when you go to start to write the book and, and you really spent years writing it.

And one of the things you did was connect with people who were friends with Jay back in middle school, friends of yours in high school, going to a high school reunion, connecting with some of the other guys who were there on the day of the accident. And I, I think about that, the importance of that kind of shared grief and again.

Not to blame the eighties, but I think we didn’t know how important it was to grieve in community. What, what was it like to go back and talk with people and have that kind of experience of years later talking about this accident that so many had been impacted by? 

Kristina Amelong: Well, instant love, pretty much, you know, because there’s a quality of the, the interior experience that you recognize instantly like, oh, you’re a person who’s carrying this thing with me and you love this person, and it’s been 30 years.

And you still think about them every day, for instance, that is something that multiple people said to me, right. Um, you know, or I’ll be looking at Jay when I die on my deathbed. Like, different things like that. So just really, really powerful, um, and healing, and healing for the other person. And so some of the highlights of my life have really been reaching out to some of these people and talking to them.

Not all the same. You know, for instance, like the young person who was with Jay when the accident happened, he feels responsible, the driver of the car, he feels responsible, right? So they didn’t, they didn’t hear what I was trying to give to them. So that was very sad. And you know, so there’s a lost opportunity there.

But for the most part, it’s been quite extraordinary to have connections with these people. 

Diane Hullet: Pretty incredible though that you kind of through Facebook or through the internet like that you can find people and you reached out to the driver of the car and said, you know, I’m Jay’s sister, and you know what a, what a uh, hand stretched out whether the hand is taken or.

The handshake turns into a hug or whatever it is. I mean, I had the impression he spoke with you just not extensively and he couldn’t quite hear, uh, the olive branch you were offering or the love you were offering. I think he was swimming in his own recrimination. Right? 

Kristina Amelong: Absolutely. He felt very responsible as one might.

Right. If you. Killed someone with your car, even though he blacked out. He had no awareness of the accident. Um, but he, he did say to me that first thing, an eye for an eye, um, where he felt like his daughter died because he killed I. My brother. So, but I don’t feel that way. But then you see in there about how my mother feels about, um, him.

Yes. Yeah. It’s not very nice. He was, 

Diane Hullet: she was still angry. She, she had her own experience of the whole thing. I also have to say as a mid-Westerner, and I loved all the Yuko references too. I was figure out, figure out the hands you were playing as you threw in the hard cave stuff. Yeah. Well, so there’s this sense of shared grief.

There’s the sense of you and your mom having fairly different experiences about the whole thing. What, what would you say about that? I mean, I think grief really tears families apart. 

Kristina Amelong: It did indeed tear us apart, and I think it always. You know, we never really recovered from that. And also, um, it brings me back to what your podcast is all about and what you’re saying about how little information people have about death and dying and how beautiful it is that you’re even doing this.

But, um, because there’s that scene in there where. Her mother comes on the day Jay died, and, and she’s holding a flashlight of his and his sweatshirt, and her mother’s like, get rid of that stuff. You know, like, you’ve gotta get over this, and it’s that day, right? So she, she, she never talked about this, never that I know of.

I was never able to find someone, even her closest people that said she would open up about this. So that was really sad. But the thing I have to say is because, um, even though our relationship was very troubled, we did stick together her whole life. She died in 2020 and, um, and I took care of her in those last months.

And I was with her when she was dying and stayed with her body, which is represented in the book. And I do have to say that me deciding to do that, no matter what our, this world relationship was like. Has been hugely healing for me and has given me an ever deeper sense of the worlds on the other side.

Being with her and being in that commitment to someone for your life and forever, you know, that what matters is that we’re together, we love each other. And so, um, I do feel like within her death process, I, at least in my being in soul. Was able to gift her with something big. And I look forward to whatever growth we have in our other lifetimes or whatever, however they unfold, you know, so I.

Diane Hullet: That’s, that’s really beautiful. I, I, it’s like I feel how you hold these juxtapositions about your life experience. Right. So your mom was difficult in some ways for you, and she was difficult with this family tragedy. I mean, it, there were just real challenges there, and yet I. The juxtaposition is you really held her in love the whole time.

She was also difficult and frustrating, and hard to be with and so on, and then you really held her in her death and in her final months of caregiving, you were so present and, and I see that with this relationship with Jay too. It’s like on the one hand, there were parts of you that were angry about it and you felt guilty about it and responsible for it, and at the same time.

All these years later, you can hold him in love too and in this mystery place. 

Kristina Amelong: Yeah, absolutely. And just to complete about my mother, like I was certainly horrible to her too at times. Right? Especially in my teenage years and my. Young adult years, like locking her in a bathroom and trying to make her talk to me about these things.

So she had her reasons for disowning me in her later life. But like, I guess that’s what I wanna say to the viewer is like, it doesn’t matter. You know, my mom, I. My mom got me through to here, right? And so I don’t, I don’t care how she treated me, you know? ’cause there’s always talk about toxic relationships and getting rid of ’em.

And it doesn’t mean I would necessarily hang out with my mother, um, you know, day after day when she maybe was missing me. But there was always the recognition of. The bond and the life long relationship. So I do wanna just iterate that out into the world, that it matters how we take care of each other, even if we’re not.

Treating each other well all the time. Oh, 

Diane Hullet: mic dropped for all of humanity right now, let’s say like that. Let’s just take care of each other. Right. I, I loved another quote that you had in the book from Juliette Lewis was The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die. Can you speak to that?

Kristina Amelong: Um, well, we’re given this gift of life and. Um, this, you know, that’s, that’s a very good question and I haven’t thought about it that much, but I’m just thinking like, of all the times that I have wanted to end my life and, and that, you know, and this is a wrestle that I had with even writing this book because, because Jay was okay with dying.

And so there’s this juxtaposition, which as you mentioned, there’s so many juxtapositions of this, so many paradoxes within the, the story. Um, so, you know, I’ve been given life by the mystery and I need to live that life, even if it’s full of suffering. And I think, do I also quote James Finley in there? I certainly talk about him, but he talks about the intersection of trauma and spirituality and the way that.

Suffering grows us. So I think that that’s what I wanna say in closing out this section right here is that. There is indeed, when you face and transform your suffering, it does grow you. It does bring you more and more to enlightenment into this profound sense of the oneness, uh, with the cosmos and with humanity and with love.

And that is something that I think ends up like all my growth ends up contributing to the whole of. Infinity, not just, you know, the people around me and the way I’m impacting through my book or through my company. Um, but I feel truly that all of our growth really does infuse this much grander story of life in general.

So 

Diane Hullet: beautiful. I mean, that’s sort of it, you know, it sort of comes down to what can we control? We can control ourselves and our responses to what happens to us, right? Or control might be the wrong word, but like that’s what we get to do is grow in response to what happens to us, the good, the bad, the ugly.

What? What do we do with it as humans here in these incarnate forms? Incarnate forms, right? Mm-hmm. 

Kristina Amelong: Well, and that matters. It doesn’t not matter, and it matters to whether you call it God or the universe or the mystery. It matters. We matter and our transformation matters. I. So 100%. We need to hold out that every individual human being matters.

Diane Hullet: You’ve got a beautiful quote where if this is you writing in the book and you say, clearly Jay can’t have made this up. He knew what most of us do, not that we are perfect as we are, no matter how messed up we may be. 

Kristina Amelong: Thank you. Yes. Yeah. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. It’s true. And I thought, I thought that there was this beautiful piece too, where you said that in the epilogue you say, ours is a love story.

Say more about that, about your relationship with Jay from, from childhood to now. 

Kristina Amelong: Well, we loved each other very much. He, he. You know, I mean, he was three and a half years younger than me, but we just had a lot of fun and a lot of love. And also just, even though he, he had what I experienced as a tragic death, he didn’t see it like that.

And so he is just been a tremendous teacher to me. And, you know, he, he is given me my business and he is, it goes on and on. And so he’s like the perfect example of. This grand love story that really we’re all living and that intersects with what we were just saying about how we all matter. And there is so much love in this world for all of us, no matter how tragic our lives are, how beautiful our lives are at the core.

Is this just astounding love? 

Diane Hullet: Should we go into what you think happened about where he got this premonition? Is that sort of, uh, something that might delve into, we could leave it as part of the book or we could say, because I, I thought that was fascinating. You know, your mom, he told your mom that it came to him in a dream.

Kristina Amelong: Yes, but my thought too, he did. He told me that. 

Diane Hullet: But then you kind of found out later that he may have at this very tender age, and again, you gotta remember it’s 1981, he may have been doing some serious drugs and that those drugs may have given him this glimpse into kind of a a out of linear time. What do we call it?

I don’t even know. A time out of time that gave them a glimpse. When you talk to some experts about it, they said, oh yeah, that happens to people all the time. Right. 

Kristina Amelong: Well, I have never met anyone who has had this exact thing happen, being young and seeing their future in, in this very intense way. And yes, so he.

Well, he didn’t tell my mom anything about his drug use. I, I was using marijuana with him and also stealing alcohol, so there was a lot of drugs in mine. I grew up in a working class, poor neighborhood, and there was so much. Access to these things. And when I was doing the research for the book, I learned that he had also been doing LSD and that he had told one of his friends, and maybe not in the book, because I, I ran into these friends after I had already finished writing it.

But that he had told them that he had seen this vision on LSD and that he, that’s how he got also the felt sense that, um, it was fine. Which, you know, still remains a mystery, right? Because can you imagine either one of us or someone we loved? Finding out in their, you know, medicine journey that they were gonna die in a week or a month, or they didn’t know, and they’re okay with it.

It’s just, it’s just. Unusual. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. He seemed to be given, as you said, and I do see it as you just said, as a medicine journey. So in this journey, he was given this premonition and also this felt sense that it was okay, and also these details that he could then share and, and as one dream expert you spoke with said.

I’ve never heard of a dream like that, right? And, and then the LSD person said, yeah, people, people have this experience out of time, whether they’re traveling back in time or forward in time through LSD. So just a really interesting piece of the experience, I think for. You know, for you to be able to hold that piece of it too, that he somehow was given this experience and he felt okay about it, you know, which is really different.

He might’ve been terrified by it and instead he was, he was okay. It actually gave him some peace. I think even about it perhaps. 

Kristina Amelong: It seems that way. Right? That was how we communicated it. And even like the the one of the stories, and it’s interesting and I’d love to hear just a little bit more from you about your direct experience of reading the book because it’s just so enjoyable for me particularly, but.

I imagine it would be nice for the audience and, um, but also one of my best friends who’s actually in the book, she read it also in the last two days, so you’re in very good company and she, she wrote, I wanna just read what she wrote, if that’s okay. And then she, she wrote, the writing is beautiful and the way you show the evolution of your memories and understanding is engrossing.

So it seems that you also experienced that, but. Um, now I forgot that other thread that we were on. So could you tell me that? ’cause it’s something really important and I wanna, oh, we were 

Diane Hullet: kind of on the medicine journey thread in how he had found peace even though he, he had this experience that was a premonition that could have been frightening.

Kristina Amelong: Right. And so it just right there to me is like a heart and throbbing core of this whole thing because there’s something about death, and you hear this in the near death experiencers too, right? That when they have their near death experience, they feel this tremendous love and this tremendous sense of being at home.

And so, yeah, what is that? And that’s. Part of the mystery. So I, 

Diane Hullet: some, I sometimes think that this, uh, this little, uh, little space and time called being incarnated in a body is just this one little blip. You know, we think it’s sort of everything, but I think, you know, Jay’s experience and what he shared with you, open up this possibility of others.

And I love the, I love the term engrossing. That really was my experience reading the book. You, you do a beautiful job of conveying a lot of the sense me, uh, sense feelings that. Sensory memories, I guess I want to call ’em in the book. So talking about the smell of a soup or the evocative feeling of, of touching clothing or something.

You know, you really draw that forward. And I agree also with your friend, there is this really beautiful evolution because, you know, this is a book where you know, from the get go what happens, right? You know that Jay. Has died in a bike accident just by reading the back cover of the book. So then the question becomes, how does the person writing the book, you, the sister, how do they grow?

How, what did they learn? Uh, why, why have they taken a bigger meaning out of this tragedy than just the details of the tragedy? And you un. Fold that both through your own life experience and also through the experience of talking with these other people. And so I just thought, you know, it’s sort of a, um, oh, detective story is really stupid.

It’s not that, but there is this sense of like, Hey, I’m trying to find this one guy, and then so-and-so knows where so-and-so is. And then you find that connection and then you run into somebody else in your hometown and learn of another connection. And so there’s this sense of. Uh, following a thread might be a better way to put it, that you began to follow these different threads in order to weave this tapestry of what happened, how have you been impacted by it, and how have you moved forward with this as a truth in your life?

And I, what I love is that you’ve moved forward with it on all these multiple levels, you know, so the one hand, it’s, uh, who I alluded to at the beginning, Bessel Vander Koch. Who wrote The Body Keeps the Score incredible book about trauma in the body. And then you, you know, you have to work with it in your own body, in your own psyche in order to be able to keep moving forward and take it to other levels.

So it’s a really multi-layered book and a really beautiful story and a tribute to you and Jay and um, yeah. Yeah. How can people find out more about it? Do you have a website or a. 

Kristina Amelong: Yeah, so well, the book is what my brother knew, and it is on Amazon and all the major booksellers, Barnes and Nobles, et cetera.

You could ask your library for it. That’s a great thing to do. Or your local bookstore. And then also I do have a website, christina amalon.com, which has my the book on it as well as my other writing. 

Diane Hullet: Fabulous. And Christina is K-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. A-M-E-L-O-N-G. Super. Well thanks so much, Christina for joining me.

This is really, really, it was a pleasure to read and a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much. It’s such an honor. As always, you can find out about the work I do at Best Life. Best death.com. Thanks so much for listening.